Comment by sveme | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sveme | Hacker News Reader

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I said it before in the other thread, but I guess it's worth reemphasizing: The abolishment of roaming charges is huge and could really establish a single telecoms market. This point has somehow been lost in all the excitement and discussions about net neutrality.

Why is this huge?

The differences between domestic rates and non-domestic rates are what kept the European Telecoms market from becoming truly European. As a German, the only viable option if I am spending most my time within Germany was to go with a German carrier. Now with the removal of roaming charges, the EU becomes the domestic market and in principle I could shop around other EU countries to find the best deal. Austria for example has some really good deals, so maybe I will go with a carrier from there. And with SEPA even billing should not be an issue.

The other (intended) thing this will spur is further consolidation of the EU Telecoms market as there will suddenly be a much larger number of competing players on the market. As I said, in principle Austrian Telecoms are now for the first time directly competing for customers with Spanish Telecoms in Germany, so I guess we'll see a lot more mergers in the close future. Which might turn out to be anticompetitive in the long run, mind.

(I blogged about it here [1] in more detail and with a few more resources, in case anyone is interested. Happy to explore this further with anyone into this topic)

[1] http://sveme.org/removing-eu-roaming-charges-is-a-big-deal.h...

Being pessimistic... as the European Telecoms becomes "truly European", the carriers will probably start merging. Eventually you'll wind up where we are in the US, with a couple of huge carriers, a moderately sized carrier, and some small carriers that barely count. And then they'll start colluding, and providing poor service because they don't have to compete anymore.

Welcome to the club.

The EU can and will act to block mergers it considers to be anticompetitive.

It's about time to progressively tax (VAT, not profit) companies in "monopoly" markets.

In germany companies in monopoly markets (e.g. power transmission) have a fixed profit margin (I think 10%).

The thing is, there effectively has been a lot of consolidation of the EU telecoms market, even with its fragmentation due to roaming tariffs. The only thing is that the likes of Vodafone, Telefónica, Orange, Deutsche Telekom, TeliaSonera, Tele2, Hutchison Whampoa, Telenor, Airtel, Swisscom, &c., have had to establish subsidiaries in the various member states up until this point, and what we're likely to see is that the parent companies will start consolidating their national subsidiaries.

I doubt we'll end up with anything near as bad as the situation in the US, where they're left with effectively four operators of note operating two incompatible sets of standards, given the EU's greater overall diversity: language barriers, if nothing else, place limits on population migration, so smaller telcos with a firm footing in a particular market might be protected from larger multinationals eating their lunch completely.

But wouldn't it cost other people more money who want to get in touch with you if you did decide to go with a "non-domestic" carrier? For instance, if I have a non-German phone number, while living in Germany, and expecting people around here to call and text me? Or does that too fall under "roaming"? To me I think of roaming as being that I, with my German number, can still call and text other German numbers, and use my data, for the same price as I normally would, even when I am physically in another EU country.

I was wondering about that as well so I checked (see the write-up):

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Update: Someone on Hackernews argued that international charges would still apply. However, according to this [1]:

"International call charges would be capped at the price of a long-distance domestic call and intra-EU mobile calls at €0.19 per minute (plus VAT)."

there would be no difference between domestic and (EU-)international, eventually creating the coveted single market.

From Ryan Heath, spokesman of Neelie Kroes:

(Sven @1sveme)

@RyanHeathEU would the new roaming rule mean that a truly single market would be created? Could an Austrian company compete in Germany?

(Ryan Heath @RyanHeathEU)

@1sveme yes. You could buy your mobile subscription from another EU country and a company could easily set up in another country

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[1] http://ec.europa.eu/news/science/130916_en.htm

(update: edited for clarity, damn, I don't get those formatting possibilities on HN)

I think you are right about that.

Roaming traditionally refers to using your phone outside of its network country. So calls to that phone will still be charged an international call charge.

Then again, if you have a data plan, coupled with some kind of VOIP service, you could effectively use your phone across all of Europe for the simple price of an unlimited data package.

So one of two things happens, either rates go up to pay for lost revenue of no roaming or rates come down as players fight it out and remove their competition.

There will be probably be many cases where "technicalities" prevent one countries telecom from cooperating and such.

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